On 100th anniversary, Torontonians salute ‘vision’ of Bloor St. viaduct’s builders

Thestar.com
December 13, 2018
David Rider

Bundled against the cold, Joyce Crook, 92, could not stay away from a birthday party for a bridge.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Crook said Wednesday after watching the unveiling of a Heritage Toronto plaque marking 100 years since the opening of the Prince Edward Viaduct that connects Bloor St. in the west to Danforth Ave. in the east.

Joyce Crook, 92, centre, talks to Mayor John Tory at the ceremony Wednesday, when she recounted memories of her father, who marvelled at what a change the Prince Edward Viaduct was for the east end of the city.

Crook, who grew up on Dilworth Cres. in East York, heard from her father Albert about returning from the “Great War” to see a magnificent structure connecting Toronto’s core to what was, in 1918, an agricultural and industrial suburb isolated by the Don Valley and Rosedale Ravine.

“He said it was great, that it changed the whole east end, it just opened it up,” Crook said in an interview after the ceremony. “Before that you had to cross at Gerrard (St.) or walk through the valley. It’s a marvellous construction. The architect had so much vision.”

Suddenly pedestrians, people on horseback and in carriages with and without motors could, in a couple of minutes, stream back and forth across what had been a daunting chasm.

The bridge, named after future King Edward VIII but popularly called the “Bloor St. viaduct,” was a monumental architecture, engineering and construction feat costing $2,480,349.05, or about $36 million in today’s dollars.

R.C. Harris, then public works commissioner, insisted a lower deck be included for a subway connection that would not be built until 1966 --foresight that saved the city a fortune in future costs and construction headaches.

Mayor John Tory told dozens of people at the ceremony there is a lesson in the fact that what is now a celebrated Toronto landmark, immortalized in film and Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel In The Skin of a Lion, was in 1918 ridiculed by many as a boondoggle “bridge to nowhere.”

“Thankfully the naysayers of the day did not win out ...” Tory said, adding he hears similar criticisms about city projects. “Even today it’s the same thing --‘too big, too bold, too expensive, too soon.’

“We will be, I hope, in the 21st century as relentless and forward thinking and determined as the team that built this viaduct a century ago.”

The bridge does, however, have a tragic side. Its height long made it a magnet for people who jumped to their deaths.

Councillor Paula Fletcher, who represents neighbourhoods on the viaduct’s east side, paid tribute to the “Luminous Veil,” a suicide barrier and public art installation first illuminated in 2015.

“That’s more bold thinking --to take a bridge that had such a sad history and to make something so beautiful out of it.”